158 Giovanna Marotta
On the opposite site, l-velarization occurring in Leghorn and Pisa is a pro-
cess whose weight receives the value [+heavy] nowadays as well as many years
ago. A low prestige value has been assigned to this process from the very begin-
ning of occurrence and it will probably maintain the same weight value in the
future. Pronouncing words such as bello ‘nice’ or cancello ‘gate’ with [ł] is a clear
sociolinguistic marker, inasmuch as it allows the Tuscan listener to assign a low
social and educational status to the speaker. This means that l-velarization is a
sociophonetic index which performs a steep slope in style shifting, as it normally
happens in the case of heavy values of weight. The same happens in the socio-
linguistic markers proposed by Labov (2001: 196 ff.), which may even become
stereotypes.^19 Despite its sociophonetic weight, the velarized lateral appears to
be currently spreading across North-Western Tuscany, as it occurs not only in
the cities of Pisa and Leghorn, but also in the areas of the countryside close to
Pisa and Leghorn, as well as in the surrounding Tyrrhenian coast. In the mod-
ern social stratification of contemporary Tuscany, overt norms, reflecting the
standard manner of speaking, can be balanced by covert norms, which assign a
positive value to the non-standard forms used by people in everyday life. Indeed,
one of the principles set out by Labov (2001: 196) perfectly applies in the case of
l-velarization in Tuscan varieties: “every overtly stigmatised feature has prestige
in the social contexts where it is normally used”. Therefore, some social groups,
such as the people working in the docks of Leghorn, use l-velarization as a cue for
marking their social identity and as a tool for expressing the sense of belonging
to a special community and a well defined social network, where strong bindings
and close-knit networks are holding (L. Milroy 1987; J. Milroy 1992). On the
other hand, such a heavy index (or marker) can strongly be stigmatised by the
educated and upper class speakers of the cities of Leghorn and Pisa, on the behalf
that “every prestige feature will be awarded an equal and opposite stigma in those
opposing contexts” (Labov 2001: 196).
At present, there seems to be a change in progress in the weight values of gor-
gia Toscana in Italy. This process normally occurs in the everyday speech of Tuscan
speakers, without any constraint related to the social status of the speaker or his/
her education, because it is a thick and very robust feature of ‘Tuscanicity’. As we
saw, its size is great and its thickness is high. Until some years ago, gorgia toscana
could be assigned the weight value [+light], then [+prestigious]. Nowadays, there
are some signs that its weight is becoming heavier than before, at least outside- The values of weight for velar /l/ in North-Western Tuscan varieties are not directly com-
parable with those of dark /l/ occurring in some varieties of British English, because different
opinions are reported in the literature about the prestige of this allophone. Some references on
the matter are Wells (1982), Horvath & Horvath (1997), Tollfree (1999).